Getting a Google Account

Questions for Laramie Project 4/1/10

**UPDATE**

Don't forget to sign your name to your post! I have more than one class at a time posting to various blogs, wikis, and whatnot, and my elderly brain cannot keep track of everyone's handle. Put at least your first name and last initial so I can record your grade.

Please post your response to one of the questions below by Saturday, April 3, at 8 a.m. Then respond to 1 of your colleagues by Sunday, April 4 at 10 p.m. Your comments should be substantive and thoughtful. Try to elaborate on your ideas, and explain why you think about things the way you do.

1. Many people were particularly upset that Matthew Sheperd was murdered because he was gay. Do you think there's something particularly bad about crime when it's aimed at someone because of their inherent characteristics (like their race, ethnicity, gender) rather than, say, because you got in a fight over something with them? Why or why not?
2. What ideas and assumptions do you think the young men had, that made them react the way they did to Matthew?

If you missed watching the movie in class, you can get it from the library: The Laramie Project

I can't find transcripts from McKinney's trial online; here's a story about the defense from the New York Times.
image published by Xnatedawgx under a creative commons attribution/share alike license

Grade Updates

Here's a link to your current grades for the course. You can look up your overall course grade, and then more specific grades, by student ID number. Look at the heading for each page to see which set of grades you're looking at (for example, your total forum grade thus far shows up on the "course grades" page under "forum." You can see what you got on each segment of the forum grade by going to the page labelled "forums").

You can see what a perfect score is for each assignment by looking for "perfect" at the bottom of each section.

Course update Spring 10

Term Paper 1: Aristotle

Here's the link for your first term paper on the Nicomachean Ethics.

You should write about all three of the bulleted points in the assignment.

Let me know if you have any questions! Get started early so that you can contact me in plenty of time if you need help, and don't hesitate to contact me for help if you're having trouble organizing your ideas or if you're running into other problems.

This is a reliable outside source if you'd like to consult further works: Aristotle and the Human Good

Be aware that it doesn't go into everything that we talked about, though.

Grades for Forum 2

Here's the link to your grades from the second forum.

Let me know if you have any trouble viewing the PDF, and let me know if you posted something but don't see a grade. It might be that I mis-typed your student ID number, or I may have missed your post. If you don't see a grade but know that you posted, please include the date and time of your post(s) in your email.

See you Thursday!

Discussion Questions

Please post a comment on one of the questions below. Post your answer by Saturday morning at 8 a.m.

Please respond to two of your colleagues by Tuesday morning at 8 a.m.

Make sure your answers are substantive and that you've given them plenty of thought, and elaborate on your answers. Good answers will be at least two generous paragraphs long.

1. Do you think Father Gabriel showed courage in the movie? What do you think made him courageous, or not? Do you think Father Rodrigo (Mendoza) showed courage? What do you think made him courageous?
2. Do you think violence is ever an appropriate response? Why or why not? What did you think about the divisions over the use of violence in response to the closing of the missions in the movie?
3. Do you think Cardinal Altamirano ought to have refused to carry out the terms of the treaty? What would it have accomplished? Does it matter that it wouldn't have stopped the closing of the missions? Why or why not?
4. The Waunana Indians of Columbia portrayed the Guarani in the film; rather than paying them individually for their roles, the director arranged to fund a trust for the entire village (the trust was used, in part, to lobby the government of Columbia for certain land rights for that group). Do you think that arrangement is at all problematic? Would you imagine Roland Joffe sugggesting that he fund a trust for the city of New York, in lieu of paying Robert DeNiro for his work?